And wherever psychoanalytic repression in any marked form takes place, there is no genuine happiness.

The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today | Daily The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today | Daily

The Conquest of Happiness (1930) is a book by Bertrand Russell, in which he attempts to diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise so prevalent even in safe and prosperous Western societies. Mass production needs mass taste, and mass taste needs humans who are raised to be more or less identical copies of each other.Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not, at least in a great majority of cases. The child from whom for any reason parental affection is withdrawn is likely to become timid and unadventurous, filled with fears and self-pity, and no longer able to meet the world in a mood of gay exploration.

The Conquest of Happiness Quotes by Bertrand Russell - Goodreads The Conquest of Happiness Quotes by Bertrand Russell - Goodreads

This view is too simple; undoubtedly there is some slight compensation in the feeling of superiority and insight which these sufferers have, but it is not sufficient to make up for the loss of simpler pleasures. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one.Like Lord Byron, after whom Russell named this kind of unhappiness, “the men who hold this view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man.

The Conquest of Happiness. By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. London The Conquest of Happiness. By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. London

In youth his liberty is restricted at school, in adult life it is restricted throughout his working hours. We can hardly find fault with Tolstoy on this account, since to him it might well be a matter of indifference whether he won military decorations or not, but in a lesser man such an act would have been one of folly.

Finally, the last common reason of unhappiness that Russell discusses is the inability to fit into one’s social surroundings. Love of power is insidious; it has many disguises, and is often the source of the pleasure we derive from doing what we believe to be good to other people. So when we have a salary that is sufficient for us, we should not look to compare it with the salary of others. We can probably all verify that too many of the people we know are addicted to various ways of wasting time, just so that they don’t experience the monotony of their lives: computer games, TV shows, but also extensive holidays, dangerous and exciting hobbies, and even just getting drunk over the weekend, every weekend, are ways of combating monotony.

The Conquest of Happiness - Medium The Conquest of Happiness - Medium

If he can persuade himself that the universe is equally tidy, he can feel almost equally safe when he has to venture forth into the streets. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. Competition cannot be reduced to the case of businessmen who might be better off after declaring a profitable bankruptcy. Instead, boredom, or rather monotony, the absence of excitement, is a necessary condition for a life that is rich in meaning and can lead to truly valuable, intellectual achievement.The more we engage with things that we are not forced to engage with, the more opportunities we have for play, for activity that is captivating and entertaining without being tiring and draining. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.